Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, meets Pope St. John Paul II at the Vatican following the canonization of St. Faustina on April 30, 2000.
By Chris Sparks
February 11 marks the first anniversary of the death of Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, the world-renowned expert on the life and spirituality of St. Faustina.
I only knew Fr. Seraphim for a few years toward the end of his life, but in that time, I got a glimpse of his total self-gift to the mission of Divine Mercy.
He would go wherever Providence would send him, and stay home when Providence saw to it that flights or events got cancelled. He would speak where he was asked to speak, and be silent where others were called on to speak. He would insist that he hadn’t done anything, that Faustina was the one we should be talking about, and Jesus, and Mary, and the other greats of Divine Mercy.
But say something incorrect in front of him, and Fr. Seraphim would be off. “No, no, no!” And then the floodgates would open of his reading, prayer, and experience. He would become a fount of information, of spirituality, of erudition. He would refer back to documents in the original languages, translate and retranslate in the service of precision, and do whatever he could to ensure both that the Divine Mercy was transmitted and that it was handed on accurately.
An incredible mix
Father Seraphim’s life was an incredible mix of the universal and the particular, of the small and the great, of the immediate and the eternal. He carried a tremendous burden for the Kingdom of Heaven, and carried it well for a long time.
On the one hand, he was a man like any other, a native of Adams, Massachusetts, who entered a religious order with a house relatively close to his home, whose whole life was about promoting a devotion he’d first encountered in his home parish where the first Divine Mercy Image to be publicly displayed in the Western Hemisphere resided.
On the other hand, he was a man who took up a heavenly mission with international and eternal ramifications, meeting with popes and cardinals, a man who changed the entire world, helping prepare the world for Christ’s Second Coming by ensuring the spread of the true Divine Mercy message and devotion to everyone.
He was a man who needed the Divine Mercy, just like the rest of us, but also an exceptionally good steward and servant of that Divine Mercy.
We are in his debt
Without his faithful work, prayer, and suffering, there would have been no Diary reaching the world. He brought out of Communist Poland the microfiche of the typewritten manuscript in his luggage. He always resisted the word “smuggled,” saying he didn’t smuggle anything; he just put it in his luggage and they never checked his bags!
Without Fr. Seraphim’s long labor, the Diary would not have been at the Holy See ahead of the May 13, 1981 attack on St. John Paul II, waiting to be called for when he was in the hospital.
Without Fr. Seraphim’s openness to a very strange visit from the Digan family, there would have been no documented beatification miracle with Fr. Seraphim on the scene.
Without Fr. Seraphim, perhaps the conclusive testimony of Dr. Valentin Fuster, which sealed the deal in the Holy See’s evaluation of the miracle for St. Faustina’s canonization, would not have been obtained in time for St. Faustina’s canonization to be the first in the new millennium.
Without Fr. Seraphim, perhaps we would not have been celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday as a universal Church in these decades since St. John Paul’s surprise announcement during his homily at St. Faustina’s canonization, which took place at Mass on Divine Mercy Sunday in the Great Jubilee in the year 2000. That announcement would put St. John Paul II’s death in a whole new context when he received Holy Communion on April 2, the Vigil of Divine Mercy Sunday, shortly before he went to the House of the Father.
A divine call
Throughout his life and work, Fr. Seraphim was a man answering a divine call. There’s reasonable disagreements over what I’m about to say, but I remain personally convinced that his work was prophesied by St. Faustina in her Diary:
May 8, [1938]. Today, I saw two enormous pillars implanted in the ground; I had implanted one of them, and a certain person, S.M., the other. We had done so with unheard-of effort, much fatigue and difficulty. And when I had implanted the pillar, I myself wondered where such extraordinary strength had come from, And I recognized that I had not done this by my own strength, but with the power which came from above. These two pillars were close to each other, in the area of the image. And I saw the image, raised up very high and hanging from these two pillars. In an instant, there stood a large temple, supported both from within and from without, upon these two pillars. I saw a hand finishing the temple, but I did not see the person. There was a great multitude of people, inside and outside the temple, and the torrents issuing from the Compassionate Heart of Jesus were flowing down upon everyone (Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, 1689).
The author and journalist Ewa Czaczkowska interpreted the hand from above as representing St. John Paul II, the Great Mercy Pope, who’d launched St. Faustina’s cause for canonization as cardinal archbishop of Krakow, beatified and canonized her as pope, and established the universal Feast of Divine Mercy Sunday. But S.M. — who was this? Father Seraphim himself insisted it referred to Bl. Michael Sopocko. Not an unreasonable assertion. After all, the Marian Fathers received Divine Mercy from Fr. Sopocko during World War II. Without that, Fr. Seraphim himself might never have been involved.
But I wasn’t convinced. The initials are S.M., after all, not M.S. Another colleague of mine, Mary Flournoy, proposed an answer. She said that, given the work of both Fr. Michael Sopocko and Fr. Seraphim Michalenko, as well as Sr. Sophia Michalenko, CMGT, a biographer of St. Faustina and biological sister to Fr. Seraphim, Mary presumed that the initials S.M. were meant to indicate all three of them.
Whatever the case, Fr. Seraphim’s whole life was given over to Divine Mercy, Mary Immaculate, the Holy Souls in Purgatory, and serving the Church where the need was greatest. He was a Marian’s Marian, a consecrated religious of exceptional fidelity and fruitfulness.
He died at age 90 on the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, a commemoration of a Marian apparition during which she proclaimed, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” What better sign of Heaven’s appraisal of his life and work could we ask for?
Son of Mary, child of God, Fr. Seraphim, please pray for us as we pray for you.
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